This section describes approaches that could be employed, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or employed. Hence, unless explicitly specified otherwise, any approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application, and any approaches described in this section are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
A data network routes network traffic in the form of data packets to and from one or more destination devices via network links. A network topology is established that identifies one or more paths for reaching a destination device, enabling the data packets to be forwarded along the one or more paths. Particular concerns in deploying an effective network topology include ensuring that the network topology is resilient to link failures without the formation of loops, and ensuring that network traffic can be controlled based on effective load balancing techniques.
One proposed loop-free routing topology includes routing arcs that provide resilience to link failures: the routing arcs enable the network traffic to be routed along any of two ends of any routing arc; the routing arcs also enable instantaneous rerouting of network traffic to a destination device in response to a detected failure of a data link, based on reversing an identified reversible link within the routing arc. Load balancing in the loop-free routing topology is based on “intra-arc” traffic management within a routing arc by an “arc cursor” node having exclusive authority for determining the direction of data traffic within the routing arc, and “inter-arc” management between routing arcs based on propagation of backpressure commands by a given routing arc to a “parent” routing arc supplying data traffic to the given routing arc.